


dear hearts and gentle people

by cheloniidae



Series: mine eyes have seen the glory [2]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Gen, Mentions of Slavery, Mother-Daughter Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-28
Updated: 2017-08-28
Packaged: 2018-12-20 21:13:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11929386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheloniidae/pseuds/cheloniidae
Summary: The Courier survives the Second Battle of Hoover Dam. Her mother loses her all the same.





	dear hearts and gentle people

Miles and miles west from the front lines of the Mojave, in a sprawling green valley where ranchers and brahmin barons fight a different kind of battle, Rose Hayden listens to the radio call her daughter a war hero. She sets the little old battered radio next to her when she’s boiling brahmin fat and oak ash for soap, keeps it by the kitchen sink as she fixes supper for herself and Cole, sets it on the bedside table when night blankets the valley. She carries it with her, always, bending her ear to the reports the way a golden poppy twists towards the light.

That’s what each scrap of news feels like: as painful, as scorching, as staring into the sun.

_We’re receiving reports that a courier has assassinated the dictator of Caesar’s Legion,_ the radio announces while Rose is out tending the bighorner flock. The word _assassin_ lodges itself in her heart like a bullet, makes every beat ache. A bighorner wanders up to her, more interested in the salt on her cheeks than in comforting her. She picks herself up and gets back to work.

Cole gave up snapping at her to turn the radio off weeks ago. Now, he only glares at it, as though he could break it with the concentrated force of his disapproval, his shame. Their dinners are quiet, nothing but faint radio chatter and the distant lowing of brahmin and the occasional _would-you-pass-the-butter-please-and-thank-you_. This is what they don’t say; this is what festers in the empty space between their words until it echoes through every room of their little house: Rose is to blame for what Johanna’s done. She’s the one who first put a knife in their daughter’s hands.

At night, after Rose’s breath evens out, Cole switches the radio off. Even in the silence, sleep evades her like a lost brahmin calf, something she tracks and calls and never finds.

She turns the news over and over in her mind, a stream worrying at a dark pebble. Rose doesn’t know what scares her more: the thought that Johanna forgot what violence begets, or the thought that she stopped caring.

* * *

Each night, to the background whisper of the radio, Rose recites the Martyrs’ Prayer. Kneels by her bed, forehead against the edge of the mattress, and says: _Forgive us the gallows; forgive us the knife. Let us walk always in the shadow of your lessons. No blood shall we spill; no hand shall we raise. To kill one is to kill us all. Forgive us._

She isn’t saying it for herself.

Johanna’s name was a prayer, too. A New Salemene name, a Martyr’s name. Something Rose whispered in the dark of a cell, hidden away in the heart of the Slavers’ Guild, Cole’s hand on her swollen belly. New Salem’s customs and laws and names were all they had left of it. Are all they have left of it, still.

And what the Slavers’ Guild couldn’t take from them, Johanna gave up willingly.

Rose tried. She tried.

* * *

_We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin. Just hours ago, an assassination attempt on President Aaron Kimball was prevented by a quick-thinking civilian. Sources within the Rangers confirm that this was Johanna Hayden, better known as the Courier. The would-be assassin was killed before he could be arrested._

* * *

_We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin. NCR military forces have successfully repelled an attack by Caesar’s Legion on Hoover Dam. The Legion’s army is in retreat._

* * *

_Today, President Kimball will present the Golden Branch, our highest civilian honor, to Jo—_

Cole switches off the radio before Rose can stop him. “Civilian,” he echoes, and makes a tired, bitter sound. “Kimball can’t call anything what it is.”

* * *

Rose’s daughter shows up on her doorstep, and Rose claps a hand over her mouth to keep from screaming.

Scars cover Johanna’s face. One circles her forehead like a crown; one is gouged deep into her cheek, barely an inch under her eye. And high on her right temple sit two scars that look like — but _can’t be can’t be can’t be_ — bullet wounds. The sight wrenches a noise from Rose’s heart, a horrified keening, and before she knows it she has Johanna wrapped in her arms.

Cole doesn’t move. Doesn’t make a sound.

“Mom,” Johanna chokes out, like a dam breaking, like a sequoia’s roots snapping in a gale. She buries her face in the crook of Rose’s neck, blonde hair against gray-streaked brown. “Mom.”

Rose holds Johanna as tightly as she ever did when she was a little girl, shushing her, soothing her. _It’s all right, momma’s here, it’ll be okay_. She doesn't know which one of them she's trying to convince. For a fleeting moment, Rose can imagine that this is still _her_ Johanna. A girl who sobbed inconsolably the first time she had to slaughter a brahmin; a girl who had to be talked into carrying so much as a whittling knife.

( _I don’t wanna hurt nobody_ , Johanna had said, all of eight years old, holding the knife like it was a snake poised to strike. Rose had cupped her daughter’s cheek and whispered: _I know, dove_.)

The radio’s description of Hoover Dam rings in Rose’s ears. She imagines the blood on Johanna’s hands seeping through her shirt, her skin, staining her bones red with her daughter’s sins.

* * *

The one thing that hasn’t changed: Johanna always brings a trinket from her travels when she visits Merced. This time, it’s a dome with a diorama of a city set inside, filled with water and white, glittering flakes. “It’s a snow globe of New Vegas,” she explains, holding it up to the light. The flecks of white swirl and sparkle.

Rose sets out an early dinner for the three of them. Corned brahmin beef, potatoes, bighorner broth, hoecakes as gold and round as the Californian sun. Nothing like the New Salemene foods Rose was raised on, crops that grew where sunshine was rarer than rain.

“Please,” she whispers to Cole in the kitchen, the smell of dough rising permeating the air. “Try to forgive her.”

“You shouldn’t have let her inside,” Cole hisses back. “That’s not our Jo.”

The miniature city watches their meal from the mantel like a voyeur. Johanna tells them what happened, haltingly, shrinking in on herself with every word. She slices up the truth the way her parents used to cut her meals, into pieces small enough for them to swallow. They choke on it anyway, listening in silence— Rose, with a hand pressed to her heart; Cole, with his jaw clenched tight, looking only at Rose.

She got shot on a delivery, she says, by a thief.

She followed the man who shot her. Just to get the package back, Johanna promises, but she touches her ear the way she always does when she’s hiding something.

She fought for the NCR. And fought, and fought, and fought. “It’s like you always said, Mom.” Johanna’s hand brushes against her neck, as though touching a memory, and her eyes shine with conviction. “We owe the Rangers everything.”

Cole excuses himself from the table suddenly, his chair shrieking against the floor, and looks anywhere but the two women.

Rose searches Johanna’s eyes for something she recognizes, but it’s like looking for a lost calf. Only so far she can go before she gets lost herself.

* * *

“The Clarkes still ‘round these parts? Evvie went and married herself their daughter, didn’t she?” Johanna makes small talk, town talk, as she dries the dishes with an old rag. They managed to get through the meal without anyone yelling, and Rose counts that as a victory. The fragile peace might be full of unspoken accusations, but it’s a peace all the same.

“You asked that already.” Rose fixes her with a look, hands deep in the soapy water filling the sink. It isn’t the first time Johanna’s forgotten something since she got here. The bullets punched a hole through her memory, Johanna told them. Made it leak like a sieve.

“Sorry.”

Rose can’t stop herself. “That isn’t what you should be sorry for.”

Johanna opens her mouth, closes it. “I didn’t come here to fight, Mom,” she says, shoulders sagging with more exhaustion than Rose has ever seen in her. (And Rose was there when Johanna dragged herself half-dead back to Merced from the Sierra Nevadas, on the other side of a caravan ambush.) “I didn’t ask for the war.”

“You didn’t turn it down, either.”

“What was I s’posed to do? Let the Legion run the West over? Somebody had to stop ‘em.”

“It didn’t have to be _you_. That’s what soldiers are for.”

Johanna turns away from her, goes back to drying the plate in her hands. She doesn’t say that she _is_ a soldier, title or no. She doesn’t have to.

“Are you sorry for it?” Rose asks.

For a long moment, Johanna is silent. Rose waits for her answer, hope roiling in her chest. _Just say yes, just say yes._

“Reckon I should be,” Johanna says. “But I’m not.”

After that, what’s left for them but good-byes?

* * *

Cole comes back in the dying twilight, boots muddied from the fields, and finds Rose still standing by the doorway. “She’s gone?”

“She never came back.”

Rose shuts the door behind him to keep the night’s chill out. It doesn’t make her feel any warmer.

* * *

Rose goes about her work: patching up a hole in the fence on the east side of the ranch, doing the paperwork that springs up more and more each year like weeds, checking the bighorner kids. No different from the day before, or the day before that. Just quieter.

The radio stays in the kitchen, silent.


End file.
